Columnists

Driving past the Amagansett School the other morning, I noticed a half-dozen or so seagulls standing on the ridge of the old slate roof. Gulls usually are up there, three stories above the schoolyard, minding their own business. But what their business is up there puzzles me.

A flip through my high school senior yearbook, and many yearbooks before mine, confirms what history already knew but what many people didn’t really talk about back then. Very few students from minority backgrounds had attended Island Trees High School in Levittown through the end of the 20th century.

We’re going soon to hear a soothsayer, and I hope what she says concerning the new year (being 2020, it should sharpen her foresight) will be as soothing as my mood is now, a fact that can be traced certainly in part to Dr. Langone’s orthotics, which seem to have angled me ever forward onto my toes, a good thing if you’re ready to rush the net in doubles.

This time of year always reminds me of The Star’s origins: The paper hit East Hampton on the day after Christmas in 1885. The Star arrived on the doorsteps of East Hampton Village residents even before the Long Island Rail Road had an East Hampton stop. Think of that! In 2020, we will count 135 years of newspapering, and are proud to say so.

Keeping our 9-year-old away from electronic devices has been a struggle since he first figured out how to work the track pad on his mother’s Mac laptop. His is a generation saturated in all things digital that finds playing a video game while listening to something on television and keeping up with friends on social media hardly distracting.

Every day during these holiday weeks seems to me like Sunday, which, I hasten to add, isn’t a particularly good thing for someone who likes to think of himself as purposeful if not actually useful.

Lights, moves around the western world’s solar calendar because it is based on the Hebrew calendar, which is an ancient, shorter, and lunar one. The years may be briefer, but since there are now 5,780 of them, there is plenty of reason to celebrate: Make of it what you will, a feeling of pride ensues if you accept thousands of years as part of your personal heritage.

My daughter Evvy and I went outside two hours before dawn on Monday to watch for shooting stars. It had been a relatively warm night, that is, just above freezing, and the sky was clear. A fraction of a yellow crescent moon could be seen in the trees to the east, just above the horizon. We stretched on the upper deck to wait.

While walking O’en one day not long ago, a woman, in approaching, said, “What a beautiful dog.”

December is crammed with holiday concerts, with performances at practically every school, church, and cultural institution. Someone else might get bored with holiday music, but not me. My interest in music doesn’t diminish, even when the music being performed gets a bit repetitive.

Meg Gage stopped by with a rare artifact this week — a vintage metal license plate with the silhouette of a fisherman pulling a net from a small sharpie below the words “The Springs N.Y.” in two-inch-high, dark-green lettering.

At the Choral Society of the Hamptons Christmas concert at the Bridgehampton Presbyterian Church last week, I found myself getting quite misty listening to the opening notes of the first carol. Aside from being transported by the music, by the familiar notes, I realized how many years it had been since I had first learned the carols.